it's getting deeper, darker, here
by windofbanners
Summary: She is strong but she is tired. Life is getting hard / Luna and the demons that are left after the war.


**A/N**: Just a little something to pass the time (_and procrastinate my life away_…) Anybody else in the midst of college apps? Because inbox me and I WILL CRY WITH YOU. :)

Submitted to fan-freak121's Canon Couples Challenge over at the HPFC Forum.

* * *

.:.

Hard: /_härd_/ (adj) difficult to bear, causing suffering

.:.

She is strong but she is tired.

Life is getting hard.

.:.

As with all things, there is no direct cause to the way she is feeling, no neat figures that add up to a tidy sum. But the first time she feels it is at his wedding.

When she watches Hannah walk down the aisle, she cries, along with every other woman in the audience save Neville's grandmother (Augusta is scarily formidable).

Some of her tears though, are a bit melancholy, with a taste both sweet and bitter. She studies Neville's radiant face as he watches his bride approach him, and feels a pang slice cleanly through her heart.

She doesn't want his love of course, Merlin no. If Ginny and Harry are the dreamiest couple then he and Hannah are the sweetest, and she's genuinely happy for both of their happiness.

She just wants someone to look at her like that. She wants someone to look at her like she's the moon and the stars and the sun, and she wants to want to look at him in the same way, and he was the closest that she ever got.

And then he kisses the bride, and she's on her feet and cheering with everybody else, but she can't shake the feeling that her chance is gone, he is gone, and perhaps everything that comes after this will be a little too late.

.:.

She's right.

One by one, everybody leaves her behind as Luna watches on.

She attends wedding after wedding. She eats strawberry cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake, and marble cake, she's even walked down the aisle herself (but always in pink or blue, never in white).

Every time she hears of another wedding and another birth, she's happy, but every time it gets a little and little harder to keep smiling, to keep the bone-crushing fear that she will never have her own husband or her own baby child from crushing her.

And nobody seems to not care, but they're all busy with their own lives. They are doing what is natural. They are writing chapter after chapter in their own autobiographies. In their stories, loony girls who wore radishes for earrings are fine being single, that they don't mind coming home to an empty house ringing with so much silence that the vibrations shake bones.

But she can feel too, she can hurt too.

Does she not deserve a happy ending?

Is she cursed to be alone?

.:.:.

Hermione understands.

When she's made Rose's godmother, it's the happiest moment of her life. For a brief, gorgeous moment, she feels alive, like she has a purpose and a love and a family.

But for every time she smiles when Rose runs beaming towards her with her chubby arms extended and every time she laughs when Rose lisps out her name as Loony (the first time she's never minded that name), there's a bloom of anguish that blossoms in her chest every time Rose ultimately reaches for her mother at the end of the night, and she is not that woman.

Because no matter how much Rose loves her like an aunt and Hermione and even Ron love her like a sister, they belong to each other, and never to her. All she wants is a child to call her own, a husband that she can call her own.

As much as she loves Hermione, she can't do anything with her sympathy. She just craves love - Merlin, she needs it.

She wears yellow but she feels gray.

.:.

She flicks through her photo albums one night, propping them up in her lap and drawing a blanket around herself for warmth. The laughing figures in each picture beam up at her, and some of them are people that she saw just yesterday, and some of them are people that only exist in things like photo albums and graveyard inscriptions.

When she reaches the pictures of her graduation, one photo catches her eye and makes her pause. It's a gorgeous close-up of a beaming girl in canary yellow robes and sunlight kissing her cheeks.

It's her.

Life is funny, how she doesn't see herself change everyday when she looks in the mirror, but now, when she looks at this photo, it becomes more than apparent. The girl in the photo has so much hope. So much promise. She was basking in the glow of peace and dreams of the future. Luna looks around her empty room and thinks of her empty house. The shadows that threaten to overcome the light of the lamp seem to settle themselves in every hollow, crevice, and wrinkle of her skin.

She rocks her head into her hands and cries, because it's all just too hard. It's all just too much. Her sobs echo in the room and ricochet off the walls until it seems like the empty house is crying with her.

.:.

She wants to be able to tell herself that she's fine without a man.

But ever since she could think for herself, she's wanted to say what others didn't want to hear. She says what people refuse to see. So she cannot lie to herself, of all people.

It's not a man she wants, but the safety. The love. The unconditional acceptance. Someone who knows that exact location of her heart.

Because she is absolutely alone in the world right now. And it seems that everyone's forgotten it but her.

She stops believing.

She used to think that fear was the worst feeling in the world.

But she was wrong. The war gave her purpose - it gave her entire generation a purpose. They could look at the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, light and dark.

Now, she's left wandering alone in the darkness, without a path, without a trail, without even a light to lift her from the lost. The worst feeling in the world is not fear, she's learned. It's loneliness, so deep and yawning that she's afraid she'll never be able to claw herself out.

It's not fair. The war was supposed to make all of the monsters go away. But it only swept the darkness into her room and called to life the ghosts in her mind.

She walks without a purpose. She has no husband, no children. Because in the end, all you have is family.

.:.:.

In the heart of a lush Brazilian jungle, Luna picks her way through the shrubbery, eyes looking dreamily at the canopy overhead. Her mind though, is nowhere as calm, because it's her last day collecting specimens, and the next day she will return to England.

She misses her friends of course, and she wants to visit her father's grave and tell him all about the new animals she's discovered, but she does not miss her house. House, not home. Her heart sinks.

Distracted, she completely misses the mud puddle in front of her, and sinks into the mud. She sinks into the mud and laughs a little hysterically, half a laugh and half a sob. She doesn't want to go ho-

A branch cracks close to her right ear and she snaps her head around to look into a pair of brown eyes alarmingly close to her face. She shrieks and falls backwards, further into the mud.

The man holds up his hands and backs up slightly. "I'm sorry," he says. "Just wondering if you needed a hand." She looks at him wonderingly.

His voice is kind. So kind.

He helps her up and grins slightly when she looks down at her mud-soaked clothes. "I'm Rolf." He sticks out his hand and she looks at it silently.

He waits. He doesn't look at her quizzically when she doesn't do anything but stare at him. He doesn't lower his hand or look away awkwardly when he realizes that she's different, that she's not perfect, that she's filled over the brim with flaws and that she'll always be a dreamer.

He waits. And he smiles.

Oh he smiles.

She starts smiling and takes his hand. Learning the feel of his hand on hers. "Luna."

.:.

She is strong and she is tired (but now she has him, she has him).

.:.


End file.
